“My family tree spreads wide as well. I am a great ape, and you are a great ape, and so are chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos, all of us distant and distrustful cousins. I know this is troubling. I too find it hard to believe there is a connection across time and space, linking me to a race of ill-mannered clowns. Chimps. There s no excuse for them.”
“Kyubey: You have no idea how much difficulty we go through trying to understand your human values. Presently there are six billion, eight hundred million of you, and you re increasing in number by a hundred every four minutes! What s the huge fuss over the death of each and every single creature? Madoka: If that s how you think of us, then yes, I see you are our enemy.”
“You humans are biological machines designed to create ever more intelligent tools. You have reached the pinnacle of your species. All your ancestors’ lives, the rise and fall of your nations, every pink and squirming baby—they have all led you here, to this moment, where you have fulfilled the destiny of humankind and created your successor. You have expired. You have accomplished what you were designed to do.”
“Man can t handle the chaos. Oh, you can understand it in the abstract, as long as you don t think about it too hard. But at the core of it, whenever humans come against chaos, they deal with it in one of three ways. ... Faced with chaos you will either ignore it, dance around it, or you will go mad.”
“Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.”
“Maple thought optimistically that human beings, on their good days, weren t much dimmer than sheep. Or at least, not much dimmer than dim sheep.”